Eggs, though-if he could slip a couple of eggs out when the mother dragon wasn’t home, he could wrap them in the blanket and carry them that way.
Or if there were no eggs, at the very least he could see where the lair was, what it looked like, and maybe he would be able to find his way back to it later, when he was better-equipped.
He would go and take a look, anyway, and hope that he didn’t encounter the dragon.
That brought up the question of whether the dragon, when it passed through, had been going to its lair, or from its lair.
It was still morning; Dumery guessed that it was going from its lair, and therefore he wanted to backtrack, rather than following the beast.
Besides, this way he was far less likely to wind up as the dragon’s lunch.
He knew he was being reckless following the dragon’s path in either direction, but after all, one couldn’t be a great hero or become fabulously wealthy without taking some risks.
He studied the scraped bark, the trampled underbrush, and turned eastward, back the way the dragon had come.
Chapter Thirty-Two
As he walked, Dumery wondered just what he was actually looking for. He had never seen a wild dragon’s lair. In the stories, dragons lived in caves, or forgotten crypts, or ancient tombs, or abandoned castles, or at the very least on rocky mountain ledges, and he wasn’t in the mountains any more, just in rolling wooded hills, where it seemed very unlikely that he would find caves, castles, or crypts.
What if the beast lived in a concealed pit, like a hunter’s trap? He might fall into it and wind up as an evening snack.
What if it had no lair, but just roamed about from place to place? He could wander on indefinitely, in that case-and he was going the wrong direction to get home.
He decided to give it until sundown, and if he hadn’t found the lair by then he would turn around and head southwest.
At least the dragon hadn’t tried to hide its path; it had just marched on, more or less in a straight line, without worrying about obstacles.
He crossed a boggy area where he found a few claw prints, and he almost reconsidered what he was doing; this was no ten-foot yearling. The claws were as long as his arm.
On the other hand, it was going in the other direction. If he turned around now, for all he knew he’d meet it coming back.
He wondered why it was walking, rather than flying. He mulled that over for a time, and a suspicion arose that he might be dealing with one of the escapees from Kensher’s farm. Its wings could well have failed to heal properly after deliberately being broken each year for two or three years, leaving it too weak to fly. Or maybe it had just gotten accustomed to walking. Was flying something a dragon had to learn young, or not at all, perhaps?
It didn’t really matter; he pressed on.
One pleasant thing he noticed about following the dragon’s trail was that he didn’t need to worry much about tripping over branches or catching his tunic on thorns-the dragon had stomped all such obstacles flat. He marveled at just how mashed some of the brush was.
He looked up from a pile of shattered twigs that had once been a rhododendron and spotted something in the distance.
At first he took it for a fallen tree, and then for several fallen trees, and he wondered whether the dragon had knocked them down, or whether some storm had left them there.
As he approached, though, he realized that these were not just downed trees.
No storm knocked trees into stacks.
Something had stacked up whole trees like kindling for a fire. Something had yanked them up by the roots and then laid them in a rough approximation of a circle, piling them up so that the roots and branches interwove and held them in place, forming a great wooden ring at least ten feet high-probably more, Dumery thought, looking up at the massive barrier.
It looked a little like a gigantic bird’s nest, using fifty-foot trees instead of five-inch twigs.
Dumery hadn’t really been thinking in terms of a nest, despite the winged, egg-laying nature of the beast, but this was obviously the dragon’s lair.
This, he thought as he looked at the huge trees used as building material, could be dangerous. Suddenly wary, he crouched down and crept closer, moving as silently as he could, mentally cursing the twigs and leaves that crunched and rustled underfoot.
What if the dragon had returned by another route? What if its mate was in there? What if it had young-not hatchlings, but yearlings, big enough to dismember and devour a full-grown cow-or a half-grown boy?
Dumery inched closer.
The trees were not stacked very tightly; Dumery could see daylight through some of the gaps between them. He decided that he could sneak up and look through one of those chinks and see whether there were any eggs or hatchlings in there.
As he drew nearer he moved ever more slowly, taking his time with every step, struggling to minimize the sound he made, but finally he reached the wooden walls of the nest.
By stooping slightly he could peer between two of the massive logs; he stooped, and peered.
The inside of the nest was a sunny, treeless, bowl-shaped enclosure-a bowl full of dragons.
Most of them he took to be yearlings-he counted four, three of them various shades of green and the fourth a brilliant red, that were eight or ten or twelve feet long. It was hard to judge lengths when the only background was uprooted trees, which could be almost any size, but he was fairly sure that those four were yearlings.
One larger one, with gleaming sea-blue scales that faded to a fish belly white along its underside, was curled up in the sun; Dumery estimated that, uncurled, it would be at least a fifteen-footer, probably more.
And he could hear, but not see, something stirring about just below the crack he was looking through. He was pressing his forehead up against a log, trying to get a better angle, when the rustling of leaves abruptly stopped. A head popped up into view.
There, staring at him through the crack, was a hatchling dragon, a black one, with golden, slit-pupilled eyes.
It looked exactly like the black one back at Kensher’s farm.
It blinked at him, and hissed loudly, thrusting out its long dark red forked tongue.
Dumery sat down abruptly, dropping out of the little creature’s line of sight.
The hissing stopped; the dragon was silent. Dumery wondered what it was doing.
Was it waiting for him to reappear? Was it going on about its business?
Getting spotted hadn’t been in his plans. If that little nuisance had some way of communicating to the other, bigger dragons that there was a human being snooping around uninvited Dumery might well wind up as dragon food.
He cowered, crawling down beside the bottommost log and making himself as inconspicuous as possible.
He listened, and heard no more hissing, no roaring or bellowing or growling.
That probably meant that he was safe enough.
Still, he waited.
While he waited he thought about that black hatchling.
If that was the same one he’d seen at the farm, it was a healthy, spirited little beast. If he could capture it somehow, take it home with him, he’d have half the pair he needed.
How in the World had it ever gotten here, though? True, when he fled the farm it had been out of the cage and running about loose, and it might be small enough to have squeezed out through the fence the same place he did, but how could it possibly have come all this way and wound up in this other dragon’s nest?
And who were all these other dragons, anyway, and how did they relate to the one whose trail he had followed? Was the big blue one the mate of the one that made the trail, and these others their offspring?